U.S.A. Forfeiture Laws

PRESUMED GUILTY
By Andrew Schneider and Mary Pat Flaherty
as published in the Pittsburgh Press, August 1991

It's a strange twist of justice in the land of freedom. A law designed to
give the cops the right to confiscate and keep the luxurious possessions of
major drug dealers mostly ensnares the modest homes, cars and cash of
ordinary, law-abiding people. They step off a plane or answer their front
door and suddenly lose everything they've worked for. They are not arrested
or tried for any crime. But there is punishment, and it's severe.

This six-day series chronicles a frightening turn in the war on drugs.
Ten months of research across the country reveals that seizure and
forfeiture, the legal weapons meant to eradicate the enemy, have done
enormous collateral damage to the innocent. The reporters reviewed 25,000
seizures made by the DEA. They interviewed 1,600 prosecutors, defense
lawyers, cops, federal agents and victims.. They examined court documents
from 510 cases. What they found defines a new standard of justice in
America. You are presumed guilty.

Part One: The Overview

February 27, 1991
Willie Jones, a second-generation nursery man on his family's Nashville
business, bundles up money from last year's profits and heads off to buy
flowers and shrubs in Houston. He makes this trip twice a year using cash,
which the small growers prefer.

But this time, as he waits at the American Airlines gate in Nashville
Metro Airport, he's flanked by two police officers who escort him into a
small office, search him and seize the $9,600 he's carrying. A ticket agent
had alerted the officers that a large black man had paid for his ticket in
bills, unusual these days. Because of the cash, and the fact that he fit a
"profile" of what drug dealers supposedly look like, they believed he was
buying or selling drugs.

He's free to go, he's told. But they keep his money - his livelihood -
and give him a receipt in its place.

No evidence of wrongdoing was ever produced. No charges were ever filed.
As far as anyone knows, Willie Jones neither uses drugs nor buys or sells
them. He is a gardening contractor who bought an airplane ticket. Who lost
his hard-earned money to the cops. And can't get it back.

That same day, an ocean away in Hawaii, federal drug agents arrive at the
Maui home of retirees Joseph and Frances Lopes and claim it for the U.S.
government. For 49 years, Lopes worked on a sugar plantation, living in its
camp housing before buying a modest home for himself, his wife and their
adult, mentally disturbed son, Thomas.

For a while, Thomas grew marijuana in the back yard - and threatened to kill
himself every time his parents tried to cut it down. In 1987, the police
caught Thomas, then 28. He pleaded guilty, got probation for his first
offense and was ordered to see a psychologist once a week. He has, and
never again has grown dope or been arrested. The family thought the
episode was behind them.

But earlier this year, a detective scouring old arrest records for
forfeiture opportunities realized the Lopes house could be taken away
because they had admitted they knew about the marijuana.

The police department stands to make a bundle. If the house is sold, the
police get the proceeds.

Jones and the Lopes family are among the thousands of Americans each year
victimized by the federal seizure law - a law meant to curb drugs by causing
financial hardship to dealers.

A 10-month study by The Pittsburgh Press shows the law has run amok. In
their zeal to curb drugs and sometimes to fill their coffers with the
proceeds of what they take, local cops, federal agents and the courts have
curbed innocent Americans' civil rights. From Maine to Hawaii, people who
are never charged with a crime have had cars, boats, money and homes taken
away.

In fact, 80 percent of the people who lost property to the federal
government were never charged. And most of the seized items weren't the
luxurious playthings of drug barons, but modest homes and simple cars and
hard earned savings of ordinary people.

But those goods generated $2 billion for the police departments that took
them.

The owners' only crime in many of these cases: They "looked" like drug
dealers. they were black, Hispanic or flashily dressed. Others, like the
Lopeses, have been connected to a crime by circumstances
beyond their control.

Says Eric Sterling, who helped write the law a decade ago as a lawyer on a
congressional committee: "The innocent-until-proven guilty concept is gone
out the window."

THE LAW: GUILT DOESN'T MATTER

Rooted in English common law, forfeiture has surfaced just twice in the
United States since Colonial times. In 1862, Congress permitted the president
to seize estates of Confederate soldiers. Then, in 1970, it resurrected
forfeiture for the civil war on drugs with the passage of racketeering laws
that targeted the assets of convicted criminals. In 1984, however, the nature
of the law was radically changed to allow the government to take possessions
without first charging, let alone convicting, the owner. That was done in an
effort to make it easier to strike at the heart of the major drug dealers.
Cops knew that drug dealers consider prison time an inevitable cost of doing
business. It rarely deters them. Profits and playthings, though are their
passions. Losing them hurts.

And there was a bonus in the law. The proceeds would flow back to the law
enforcement to finance more investigations. It was to be the ultimate
poetic justice, with criminals financing their own undoing. But eliminating
the necessity of charging or proving a crime has moved most of the action to
civil court, where the government accuses the item - not the owner - of being
tainted of crime.

This oddity has court dockets looking like purchase orders: United States
of America vs. 9.6 acres of land and lake; U.S. vs. 667 bottles of wine.
But it's more than just a labeling change. Because money and property are
at stake instead of life and liberty, the constitutional safeguards in
criminal proceedings do not apply. The result is that "jury trials can be
refused; illegal searches condoned; rules of evidence ignored," says
Louisville, Ky., defense lawyer Donald Heavrin. The "frenzied quest for
cash," he says, is "destroying the judicial system."

Every crime package passed since 1984 has expanded the use of forfeiture,
and now there are more than 100 statutes in place at the state and federal
level. Not just for drug cases anymore, forfeiture covers the likes of
money laundering, fraud, gambling, importing tainted meats and carrying
intoxicants onto Indian land.

The White House, Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration
say they've made the most of the expanded law in getting the big-time
criminals, and they boast of seizing mansions, planes and millions in cash.
But the Pittsburgh Press in just 10 months was able to document 510 current
cases that involved innocent people - or those possessing a very small
amount of drugs - who lost their possessions.

And DEA's own database contradicts the official line. It showed that
big-ticket items - valued at more than $50,000 - were only 17 percent of the
total 25,297 items seized by DEA during the 18 months that ended last
December.

"If you want to use that 'war on drugs' analogy, then forfeiture is like
giving the troops permission to loot," says Thomas Lorenzi, president-elect
of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The near-obsession with forfeiture continues without any proof that it
curbs drug crime - its original intent.

"The reality is, it's very difficult to tell what the impact of drug
seizure and forfeiture is," says Stanley Morris, deputy director of the
federal drug czar's office.

POLICE FORCES KEEP THE TAKE

The "loot" that's coming back to police forces all over the nation has
redefined law-enforcement success. It now has a dollar sign in front of
it.

For nearly 18 months, undercover Arizona state troopers worked as drug
couriers driving nearly 13 tons of marijuana from the Mexican border to
stash houses around Tucson. They hoped to catch the Mexican suppliers and
distributors on the American side before the dope got on the streets.

But they overestimated their ability to control the distribution. Almost
every ounce was sold the minute they dropped it at the houses. Even though
the troopers were responsible for tons of drugs getting loose in Tucson, the
man who supervised the set-up still believes it was worthwhile. It was
"a success from a cost-benefit standpoint," says former assistant attorney
general John Davis. His reasoning: It netted 20 arrests and at least $3
million for the state forfeiture fund.

"That kind of thinking is what frightens me," says Steve Sherick, a
Tucson attorney. "The government's thirst for dollars is overcoming any
long-range view of what it is supposed to be doing, which is fighting
crime."

George Terwilliger III, associate deputy attorney general in charge of
the U.S. Justice Department's program, emphasized that forfeiture does fight
crime, and "we're not at all apologetic about the fact that we do benefit
(financially) from it."

In fact, Terwilliger wrote about how the forfeiture program financially
benefits police departments in the 1991 Police Buyer's Guide of Police Chief
Magazine. Between 1986 and 1990, the U.S. Justice Department generated $1.5
billion from forfeiture and estimates that it will take in $500 million this
year, five times the amount it collected in 1986.

District attorney's offices throughout Pennsylvania handled $4.5 million
in forfeitures last year; Allegheny County, $218,000; and the city of
Pittsburgh, $191,000 - up from $9,000 four years ago. Forfeiture pads the
smallest towns' coffers. In Lenexa, Kan., a Kansas City suburb of 29,000
"we've got about $250,000 moving in court right now," says narcotics
Detective Don Crohn.

Despite the huge amounts flowing to police departments, there are few
public accounting procedures. Police who get a cut of the federal
forfeiture funds must sign a form saying merely they will use it for "law
enforcement purposes." To Philadelphia police that meant new air conditioning.
In Warren County, N.J., it meant use of a forfeited yellow Corvette for the
chief assistant prosecutor.

"LOOKING" LIKE A CRIMINAL

Ethel Hylton of New York City has yet to regain her financial
independence after losing $39,110 in a search nearly three years ago in
Hobby Airport in Houston.

Shortly after she arrived from New York, a Houston officer and Drug
Enforcement Administration agent stopped the 46-year-old woman in the
baggage area and told her she was under arrest because a drug dog had
scratched at her luggage. The dog wasn't with them, and when Miss Hylton
asked to see it, the officers refused to bring it out.

The agents searched her bags, and ordered a strip search of Miss Hylton,
but found no contraband. In her purse, they found the cash Miss Hylton
carried because she planned to buy a house to escape the New York winters
which exacerbated her diabetes. It was the settlement from an insurance
claim and her life's savings, gathered through more than 20 years of work
as a hotel housekeeper and hospital night janitor. The police seized all
but $10 of the cash and sent Miss Hylton on her way, keeping the money
because of its alleged drug connection. But they never charged her with a
crime.

The Pittsburgh Press verified her jobs, reviewed her bank statements and
substantiated her claim she had $18,000 from an insurance settlement. It
also found no criminal record for her in New York City. With the mix of
outrage and resignation voiced by other victims of searches, she says:
"The money they took was mine. I'm allowed to have it, I earned it."

Miss Hylton became a U.S. citizen six years ago. She asks, "Why did they
stop me? Is it because I'm black or Jamaican ?" Probably both - but the
Houston police haven't said.

Drug teams interviewed in dozens of airports, train stations and bus
terminals and along major highways repeatedly said they didn't stop
travelers based on race. But Pittsburgh Press examination of 121 travelers'
cases in which police found no dope, made no arrest, but seized money
anyway, showed that 77 percent of the people stopped were black, Hispanic or
Asian.

In April 1989, deputies from Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, seized
$23,000 from Johnny Sotello, a Mexican-American whose truck overheated on
the highway. They offered help, he accepted. They asked to search his truck,
he agreed. They asked if he was carrying cash. He said he was because he
was scouting heavy equipment auctions. They then pulled a door panel from
the truck, said the space behind it could have hidden drugs, and seized the
money and the truck, court records show. Police did not arrest Sotello but
told him he would have to go to court to recover his property.

Sotello sent auctioneers' receipts to police which showed that he was a
licensed buyer. The sheriff offered to settle the case, and with his legal
bills mounting after two years, Sotello accepted. In a deal cut last March,
he got his truck but only half his money. The cops kept $11,500.

"I was more afraid of the banks than anything - that's one reason I carry
cash," says Sotello. "But a lot of places won't take checks, only cash or
cashier's checks for the exact amount. I never heard of anybody saying you
couldn't carry cash."

Affidavits show the same deputy who stopped Sotello routinely stopped the
cars of black and Hispanic drivers, exacting "donations" from some. After
another of the deputy's stops, two black men from Atlanta handed over $1,000
for a "drug fund" after being detained for hours, according to a handwritten
receipt reviewed by The Pittsburgh Press. The driver got a ticket for
"following to (sic) close."

Back home, they got a lawyer. Their attorney, in a letter to the sheriff's
department, said deputies had made them "fear for their safety, and in
direct exploitation of that fear a purported donation of $1,000 was
extracted....." If they "were kind enough to give the money to the sheriff's
office," the letter said, "then you can be kind enough to give it back." If
they gave the money "under other circumstances, then give the money back so
we can avoid litigation." Six days later, the sheriff's department mailed
the men a $1,000 check.

Last year, the 72 deputies of Jefferson Davis Parish led the state in
forfeitures, gathering $1 million - more than their colleagues in New
Orleans, a city 17 times larger than the parish. Like most states, Louisiana
returns the money to law enforcement agencies, but it has one of the more
unusual distributions: 60 percent goes to the police bringing the case, 20
percent to the district attorney's office prosecuting it and 20 percent to
the court fund of the judge signing the forfeiture order.

"The highway stops aren't much different from a smash-and-grab ring,"
says Lorenzi, of the Louisiana Defense Lawyers Association.

PAYING FOR YOUR INNOCENCE

The Justice Department's Terwilliger says that in some case "dumb
judgment" may occasionally create problems, but he believes there is an
adequate solution. "That's why we have courts."

But the notion that courts are a safeguard for citizens wrongly accused
"is way off," says Thomas Kerner, a forfeiture lawyer in Boston. "Compared
to forfeiture, David and Goliath was a fair fight." Starting from the moment
the government serves notice that it intends to take an item, until any
court challenge is completed, "the government gets all the breaks," says
Kerner. The government need only show probable cause for a seizure, a
standard no greater than what is needed to get a search warrant. The lower
standard means that the government can take a home without any more evidence
than it normally needs to take a look inside.

Clients who challenge the government, says attorney Edward Hinson of
Charlotte, N.C., "have the choice of fighting the full resources of the U.S.
Treasury or caving in."

Barry Kolin caved in. Kolin watched Portland, Ore., police padlock the
doors of Harvey's, his bar and restaurant, for bookmaking on March 2.
Earlier that day, eight police officers and Amy Holmes Hehn, the
Multnomah County deputy district attorney, had swept into the bar, shooed
out waitresses and customers and arrested Mike Kolin, Barry's brother and
bartender, on suspicion of bookmaking.

Nothing in the police documents mentioned Barry Kolin, and so the
40-year-old was stunned when authorities took his business, saying they
believed he knew about the betting. He denied it. Hehn concedes she did not
have the evidence to press a criminal case against Barry Kolin, "so we seized
the business civilly." During a recess in a hearing on the seizure weeks
later, "the deputy DA says if I paid them $30,000 I could open up again,"
Kolin recalls. When the deal dropped to $10,000 Kolin took it.

Kolin's lawyer, Jenny Cooke, calls seizure "extortion." She says: "There
is no difference between what the police did to Barry Kolin or what Al
Capone did in Chicago when he walked in and said, 'This is a nice little bar
and it's mine.' "The only difference is today they call this civil
forfeiture."

MINOR CRIMES, MAJOR PENALTIES

Forfeiture's tremendous clout helps make it "one of the most effective
tools that he have," says Terwilliger. The clout, though, puts property
owners at risk of losing more under forfeiture than they would in a criminal
case in the same circumstances. Criminal charges in federal and many state
courts carry maximum sentences. But there's no dollar cap on forfeiture,
leaving citizens open to punishment that far exceeds the crime.

Robert Brewer of Irwin, Idaho, is dying of prostate cancer, and used
marijuana to ease the pain and nausea that comes with radiation treatments.
Last Oct. 10, a dozen deputies and Idaho tax agents walked into the
Brewer's living room with guns drawn and said they had a warrant to search.
The Brewers, Robert, 61 and Bonita, 44, both retired for the postal
service, moved from Kansas City, Mo., to the tranquil, wooded valley of
Irwin in 1989. Six months later, he was diagnosed.

According to police reports, an informant told authorities Brewer ran a
major marijuana operation. The drug SWAT team found eight plants in the
basement under a grow light and a half-pound of marijuana. The Brewers were
charged with two felony narcotics counts and two charges for failing to buy
state tax stamps for the dope. "I didn't like the idea of the marijuana, but
it was the only thing that controlled his pain," Mrs. Brewer says.

The government seized the couple's five-year-old Ford van that allowed
him to lie down during his twice-a-month trips for cancer treatment at a
Salt Lake City hospital, 270 miles away. Now they must go by car. "That's a
long painful ride for him. His testicles would sometimes swell up to the
size of cantaloupes, and he had to lie down because of the pain. He needed
that van, and the government took it," Mrs. Brewer says. "It looks like the
government can punish people any way it sees fit."

The Brewers know nothing about the informant who turned them in, but
informants play a big role in forfeiture. Many of them are paid, targeting
property in return for a cut of anything that is taken.

The Justice Department's asset forfeiture fund paid $24 million to
informants in 1990 and has $22 million allocated this year. Private citizens
who snitch for a fee are everywhere. Some airline counter clerks receive
cash awards for alerting drug agents to "suspicious" travelers. The practice
netted Melissa Furtner, a Continental Airlines clerk in Denver, at least
$5800 between 1989 and 1990, photocopies of the checks show.

Increased surveillance, recruitment of citizen-cops, and expansion of
forfeiture sweeps are all part of the take-now, litigate-later syndrome that
builds prosecutors' careers, says a former federal prosecutor. "Federal law
enforcement people are the most ambitious I've ever met, and to get ahead
they need visible results. Visible results are convictions and, now,
forfeitures," says Don Lewis of Meadville, Drawford County.

Lewis spent 17 years as a prosecutor, serving as an assistant U.S.
attorney in Tampa as recently as 1988. He left the Tampa job - and became a
defense lawyer - when "I found myself tempted to do things I wouldn't have
thought about doing years ago."

Terwilliger insists U.S. attorneys would never be evaluated on "something
as unprofessional as dollars." Which is not to say Justice doesn't watch the
bottom line. Cary Copeland, director of the department's Executive Office for
Asset Forfeiture, said they tried to "squeeze the pipeline" in 1990 when the
amount forfeited lagged behind Justice's budget projections. He said this was
done by speeding up the process, not by doing, "a whole lot of seizures."

ENDING THE ABUSE

While defense lawyers talk of reforming the law, agencies that initiate
forfeitures scarcely talk at all. DEA headquarters makes a spectacle of
busts like the seizure of fraternity houses at the University of Virginia in
March. But it refuses to supply detailed information on the small cases
that account for most of its activity.

Local prosecutors are just as tight-lipped. Thomas Corbett, U.S. Attorney for
Western Pennsylvania, seals court documents on forfeitures because "there
just are some things I don't want to publicize. The person whose assets we
seize will eventually know, and who else has to?"

Although some investigations need to be protected, there is an
"inappropriate secrecy" spreading through the country, says Jeffrey Weiner,
president-elect of the 25,000-member National Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers. "The Justice Department boasts over the few big fish they
catch. But they throw a cloak of secrecy over the information on how many
innocent people are getting swept up in the same seizure net, so no one can
see the enormity of this atrocity."

Terwilliger says the net catches the right people: "bad guys" as he calls
them. But a 1990 Justice report on drug task forces in 15 states found they
stayed away from the in-depth financial investigations needed to cripple
major traffickers. Instead "they're going for the easy stuff," says James
"Chip" Coldren Jr., executive director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance,
a research arm of the federal Justice Department.

Lawyers who say the law needs to be changed start with the basics: The
government shouldn't be allowed to take property until after it proves the
owner guilty of a crime. But they go on to list other improvements, including
having police abide by their state laws, which often don't give police as
much latitude as the federal law. Now they can use federal courts to
circumvent the state.

Tracy Thomas is caught in that very bind. A jurisprudence version of the
shell game hides roughly $13,000 taken from Thomas, a resident of Chester,
near Philadelphia. Thomas was visiting in his godson's home on Memorial Day,
1990, when local police entered looking for drugs allegedly sold by the
godson. They found none and didn't file a criminal charge in the incident.
But they seized $13,00 from Thomas, who works as a $70,000-a-year engineer,
says his attorney, Clinton Johnson. The cash was left over from a sheriff's
sale he's attended a few days before, court records show. The sale required
cash - much like the government's own auctions.

During a hearing over the seized money, Thomas presented a withdrawal
slip showing he'd removed money from his credit union shortly before the
trip and a receipt showing how much he had paid for the property he'd bought
at the sale. The balance was $13,000. On June 22, 1990, a state judge
ordered Chester police to return Thomas'
cash. They haven't.

Just before the court order was issued, the police turned over the cash
to the DEA for processing as a federal case, forcing Thomas to fight another
level of government. Thomas now is suing the Chester police, the arresting
officers and the DEA. "When DEA took over that money, what they in effect
told a local police department is that it's OK to break the law," says
Clinton Johnson, attorney for Thomas.

Police manipulate the courts not only to make it harder on owners to
recover property, but to make it easier for police to get a hefty share of
any forfeited goods. In federal court, local police are guaranteed up to
80 percent of the take - a percentage that may be more than they would
recover under state law.

Pennsylvania's leading police agency - the state police - and the state's
lead prosecutor - the Attorney General - bickered for two years over state
police taking cases to federal court, an arrangement that cut the Attorney
General out of the sharing. The two state agencies now have a written
agreement on how to divvy the take.

The same debate is heard around the nation. The hallways outside Cleveland
courtrooms ring with arguments over who will get what, says Jay Milano, a
Cleveland criminal defense attorney. "It's causing a feeding frenzy"

TOMORROW: "The Way You Look"

The following is a side box on Part One:

GOVERNMENT SEIZED HOME OF MAN WHO WAS GOING BLIND

James Burton says he loves America and wants to come home. But he can't.
If he does, he'll wind up in prison, go blind, or both. Burton and his
wife, Linda, live in an austere, concrete-slab apartment furnished with lawn
chairs near Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It is home much different from
the large house and 90-acre farm they owned near Bowling Green, Ky., before
the government seized both. For Burton, who has glaucoma, home-grown
marijuana provided his relief - and his undoing.

Since 1972, federal health secretaries have reported to Congress that
marijuana is beneficial in the treatment of glaucoma and several other
medical conditions. Yet while some officials within the Drug Enforcement
Administration have acknowledged that medical value of marijuana, drug
agents continue to seize property where chronically ill people grow it.

"Because of the emotional rhetoric connected with the marijuana issue, a
doctor who can prescribe cocaine, morphine, amphetamines, and barbiturates
cannot prescribe marijuana, which is the safest therapeutically active drug
known to man," Francis Young, administrative law judge for DEA, was quoted
as saying in Burton's trial.

In an interview this past July 4, Burton said, "We don't really have any
choice right now but to stay" in the Netherlands, where they moved after he
completed a one-year jail term for three counts of marijuana possession. "I
can buy or grow marijuana here legally, and if I don't have the marijuana,
I'll go blind.

Burton, a 43-year-old Vietnam War veteran, has a rare form of hereditary,
low-tension glaucoma. All of the men on his mother's side of the family
have the disease, and several already are blind. It does not respond to
traditional medications. At the time of Burton's arrest, N.C. ophthalmologist
Dr. John Merritt was the only physician authorized by he government to test
marijuana in the treatment of glaucoma patients. Merritt testified at
Burton's trial that marijuana was "the only medication' that could keep him
from going blind.

On July 7, 1987 Kentucky state police raided Burton's farm and found 138
marijuana plants and two pounds of raw marijuana. "It was the kickoff of
Kentucky drug awareness month, and I was their special kickoff feature. It
was all over television," Burton said. Burton admitted growing enough
marijuana to produce about a pound a month for the 10 to 15 cigarettes he
uses each day to reduce pressure in his eye. A jury decided he grew the dope
for his own use - not to sell, as the government contended - and in March
1988 found him guilty of three counts of simple possession.

The pre-sentence report on Burton shows he had no previous arrests. The
judge sentenced him to a year in a federal maximum security prison, with no
parole. On top of that, the government took his farm: 90 rolling, wooded
acres in Warren Country purchased for $34,701 in 1980 and assessed at twice
that amount when it was taken. On March 27, 1989, U.S. District Judge Ronald
Meredith - without hearing any witnesses and without allowing Burton to
testify in his own behalf - ordered the farm forfeited and gave the Burtons
10 days to get off the land. When owners of property live at a site while
marijuana is growing in their presence, there is no defense to forfeiture,"
Meredith ruled.

"I never got to say two words in defense of keeping my home, something we
worked and saved for for 18 years," said Burton, who was a master electrical
technician. Linda, 41, worked for an insurance company. "On a serious
matter like taking a person's home, you'd think the government would give
you a chance to defend it."

Joe Whittle, the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Burton case, says he
didn't know about the glaucoma until Burton's lawyer raised the issue in
court. His office has "taken a lot of heat on this case and what happened
to that poor guy," Whittle says. "But we did nothing improper. Congress
passed these laws, and we have to follow them. If the American people wanted
to exempt certain marijuana activity - these mom and pop or personal use or
medical cases - they should speak through their duly elected officials and
change the laws. Until those laws are changed, we must enforce them to the
full extent of our resources."

The action was "an unequaled and outrageous example of government abuse,"
says Louisville lawyer Donald Heavrin, who failed to get the U.S. Supreme
Court to hear the case. "To send a man trying to save his vision to prison,
and steal the home and land that he and his wife had worked decades for,
should have the authors of the Constitution spinning in their graves."

George Terwilliger, who helps set Justice Department's forfeiture policy,
calls the law "effective".